From the TED Prize blog: Congratulations to the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS) and 2008 TED Prize winner Neil Turok on winning $2 million in funding from Google’s Project 10^100. Project 10^100 (10 to the 100th power) was a call for ideas to divide a $10 million fund into five pieces that would help as many people as possible around the world. AIMS’ piece of the prize will be used to expand its network of science and math academies that promote graduate-level study in Africa.

Some 150,000 ideas were submitted to Project 10^100, then narrowed down to 16 finalist ideas. Over the past 12 months, Google reviewed concrete proposals to tackle those ideas, which resulted in the five winners.

Other winners include the wonderful Khan Academy, a network of educational video; the FIRST robotics challenge (led by TEDTalks star Dean Kamen); Public.Resource.org, which works to make governmnt transparent; and the Schweeb monorail concept.

Today in Ontario, Stephen Harper, the Prime Minister of Canada, announced $20 million CDN in federal funding to expand the African Institute of Mathematical Sciences (AIMS) into five new locations across Africa by 2015, including Ethiopia, Ghana and Senegal. AIMS was founded by TED Prize winner Neil Turok, the director of the Perimeter Institute in […]

Amy Novogratz just announced from stage that Google has donated $1 million to AIMS, the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences. This follows Daphney Singo’s moving talk about how AIMS is helping her gain her PhD in nuclear physics — a standing-ovation story of one South African woman’s determination to become educated. As her mother told […]